Quotes About Art

Creative without strategy is called 'art.' Creative with strategy is called 'advertising.'

Where there is no human connection, there is no compassion. Without compassion, then community, commitment, loving-kindness, human understanding, and peace all shrivel. Individuals become isolated, the isolated turn cruel, and the tragic hovers in the forms of domestic and civil violence. Art and literature are antidotes to that.

I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

Movies are visual, aural, they involve people, and life, and ideas and art, they are so elastic. They can hold anything, withstand everything, and make you feel anything. Other arts can do that, but movies are the only ones that can incorporate other media into cinema.

The sculptor who deals with form seeks to imprison beauty in a marble statue that will withstand the ravages of time during millenniums; but a marble statue is cold and speaks to but a few of the most evolved who are able to infuse the statue with their own life.

Art is changing. Again. Here. Now. Opportunities to witness this are rare, so attend and observe.

In the 1970s, a lot of critics didn't understand video. I got a lot of bad reviews. But film-makers didn't understand what we were doing, either. There were actual fistfights between film-makers and video-makers. I was witness to one.

The biggest insult is that I've been called an exaggerator... I tell the truth as I know it. I don't glamorize the nightmare and horror that I witness; I just digest it and spew it back, with venom.

Anybody with a sharp brain and a mic can become a comedian, but there's a need to move beyond it. The audience wants to witness the marriage of theatre, comedy and something more.

I'm also a huge cinephile, and I have witnessed that to honor the book literally word-for-word never makes a good movie.

I like the ideology of there being no such thing as perfection. But I'm of the opinion that I have witnessed perfection at various times, especially in art.

I've witnessed the survival of the theatre several times when it was meant to be dying.

Growing up with a bold feminist in my mother, I witnessed her march magnificently from mini to maxi, fashions so obviously linked to powerful statements of female progression, equality and recognition. I knew no other than freedom of expression in all the forms it came in; art, theatre, fashion, literature and music.

I have no arguments to defend how brutal and disturbing a ritual the corrida is. Like all tragedies, no matter the beauty created, there are no happy endings. If it is indeed an art form, bullfighting is the most disturbing I have ever witnessed.

I think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let other people speak... to travel... to experience the world. And memorialize it.

Music can be witty, but it's not funny unless it's conceptually funny.

Nam June Paik's artworks are highly intellectual, cutting-edge, and sophisticated. But he was also witty, humorous, and self-deprecating.

A secondhand wardrobe hand clothes doesn't make one an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, or HIV. I hate to say it - none of these make one an artist. They can help, but just as being gay doesn't make one witty... the only thing that makes one an artist is making art.

Coming from the Midwest, I didn't know about stand-up as an art. I just thought stand-up comedians were old men in suits talking about their wives.

Historically, the women who have been the great painters of the canon have very often have been the wives or daughters of supportive men. Like Artemisia, whose father was a very established painter. I will say that the two current contemporary artists I admire the most are women: Kara Walker and Swoon.

My whole right arm is tattooed in honor of 'Wizard of Oz.'